Let's be honest for a minute.
 
It didn't happen yesterday, and it's not going to happen today, or tomorrow, or the day after that.
 
The end of this particular little speck of nothingness planet is going to happen in about 5 billion years time when our pokey little insignificant yellow dwarf companion star expands and swallows it up.
 
Who can tell if life on earth will end before that?
 
We may yet blow ourselves to pieces. We will be hit by a giant asteroid (or much more likely many giant asteroids) during that 5 billion year wait, unless we develop the technology to divert their course. We may succumb as a species to an as yet un-evolved biological threat. Or alien invasion, who knows.
 
Truth is, you can call any of the above anything you want, but The Rapture it certainly isn't.
 
It seems to me that The Rapture is totally and utterly concerned solely with mankind - Homo sapiens - rewarding 'good' folk with eternal life in paradise and punishing 'bad' people with an eternity in hell.
 
What about all the other millions of species of life on earth - what's going to happen to them while we're getting sorted out into good and evil? Do good bacteria go to heaven? Do bad armadillos go to hell? I think I know the answer to this - they don't have a 'soul' so my question is at best an irrelevance.
 
And what about the inhabitants of other planets? Are they included in our Rapture? Or do they get one of their own?
 
In other words, is The Rapture universal, or specific?
 
I'm guessing the Bible infers that it's a universal event. Only when it was written down over two thousand years ago the Universe was perceived as being unimaginably smaller than we know today - then, it didn't even include the Americas or Australia or Antarctica... you catch my drift.
 
I'm afraid it's this pompous attitude that humans are the only species in the universe worth ‘Rapturing’ – that we are ‘worth’ anything really – that really grinds my gears.
 
We are a product of evolution, capable of tracing our ancestry back to some chemicals that happened to be able to copy themselves. We live on a small planet orbiting a small mainstream star somewhere near the edge of a run-of-the-mill galaxy.
 
Conditions for life (as we know it Jim) are pretty good – our planet happens to be in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone – if it wasn’t, I’m guessing we wouldn’t be here.
 
And what are the mechanics of The Rapture?
 
I’m assuming we stop growing old in order to ‘live’ forever? If that’s correct, then what about babies, and very old folk, and handicapped people, blind people, mentally ill people? Are they damned to spend eternity like this? What about pregnant women – what happens there? And folk with missing limbs – does a severed leg grow back? Do we eat? Do we drink? Do we go to the toilet? Do we breathe? Do we make love? If there's no pain, can we still feel 'nice' things?
 
And we’re taught that the dead will (metaphorically) rise from their graves to be judged. How far back down the evolutionary tree does the judging go? Homo sapiens only? Does dear old Homo habilis get a look in? And do we really want Homo erectus grunting up the place?
 
Sorry to be flippant, but it seems to me that heaven would be a great place for middle-aged, non-handicapped, intelligent people. Coincidentally, the same people who probably wrote the Bible.
 
Enjoy your life if you’re lucky enough to be able to (I’m guessing the overwhelming majority of humans don’t), but take full responsibility for your own actions. Ultimately, you and you alone should be the judge of whether these actions are good or bad.
 
Apologies too for the blatant TOS violation, but as on many previous occasions, I wasn’t the first in this thread.
 

craigb


Mental note to self...  Next time I'm in England (probably annoying Knighted wankers at darts), make time to have a pint with Steve...

 
My round
 
 

I suppose we should find someone here cynical enough to point out that belief in the Rapture has more to do with rampant narcissism than it does with religion - except for the part about selling books, that is. 

But who here would say something like that?